HC: Do you believe?

There's a psychic in my cute little town. She has long blond hair with bangs and gorgeous blue eyes. She's one of those people who, even when she's 95, will be cute and girly, and all you'll have to do to see her what she looked like as a little girl is blur your eyes a little bit when you look at her.

She calls herself a witch. When I hear that word I immediately think of Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz, or the three witches in Macbeth stirring their caldron, or any other standard Halloween issue black-hatted, big nosed--preferably with a wart at the end, cackling version of "witch."

Maya, therefore, is something of a mystery to me.

When you meet her she's immediately warm and motherly. You may wrack your brain trying to remember if she's related to you somehow, or if you've always known her and somehow just forgot for a minute. You sit down in her little shop and she shuffles her tarot cards. She lays them out on the table and you pick some and she begins reading.

Am I a believer? I'm not sure. I think some people are very intuitive. Some people 'see' things others don't. Whether I believe or not, Maya says things that certainly seem psychic...things I don't think she could know. I won't go into proof right now, because that's not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about the need to be heard and the need to feel that someone cares. Maya is great at listening and helping. She's very nurturing. Going to see her is almost like going to a therapy session, but gentler, and without the stigma of "there's something wrong with me so I need to see a therapist" attached to it.

Maya makes me feel better. She reassures me. She helps me hear me, because sometimes I'm not a very good listener to myself. She asks me questions, gives me suggestions, and makes me think about ways to make my life even better.

The funny thing about talking about Maya now is that I was only a bystander in my latest visit to her. I accompanied a friend today, so the session wasn't about me. Before we got there, I asked my friend what she wanted to talk to Maya about. My friend said she wanted to know how to really sever ties with her ex-husband, but she wasn't going to say anything to Maya about it because she wanted to hear first what Maya came up with. Sure enough, Maya turned over the first few cards and said, "What's with you and this man, your ex-husband?" It went on from there. And it was very interesting and expansive and helpful and meaningful. Is it psychic? What's the real definition of psychic? Could Maya pass ESP tests? I really don't care. Maya is a lovely, caring, funny woman. Both my friend and I left feeling positive, and feeling the possibilities of the future.

Maya hugged us both as we left and I realized that that was just the physical manifestation of what she had already been doing psychically for half an hour: giving us hugs.

She's a lovely woman.